Startup Summit Group buys a mountain

This article was taken from the October 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.

Not many entrepreneurs buy a mountain. But on 7 May, Elliott Bisnow, Brett Leve, Jeff Rosenthal, Jeremy Schwartz and Ryan Begelman -- cofounders of the Summit Group, which hosts events for startup people and activists -- announced just that. They bought Powder Mountain, a ski resort outside Salt Lake City, Utah, for a reported $40 million (£26 million). (Summit did not disclose the exact price.) "We heard it was for sale in 2011 and we've been working on this deal since," says Thayer Walker, Summit's chief reconnaissance officer. "We now have 10,000 acres [4,000 hectares] to create an epicentre of culture and innovation."

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At Powder Mountain, Summit plans to build a development that includes 500 homes and a village of comparable density, a recording studio, conference lodge, startup incubator and an innovation laboratory. "There's also a neuroscientist who wants to set up a lab to study peak performance," says Walker. "We want to create a salon culture in an interdisciplinary community, with social entrepreneurs, actors, musicians, reverse-ageing scientists, Nasa astronauts, string theorists." They are currently laying down essential infrastructure, from roads to sanitation. Summit intends that Powder Mountain becomes its permanent home, with year-round events for which invitation-only tickets cost around $3,000 (£1,912).

Powder Mountain opened as a ski resort in February 1972

Jason Kimball

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It's a change of pace for Summit, which, since 2008, has organised events in venues from Playa del Carmen in Mexico to a cruise ship in the Caribbean, with guests including Bill Clinton, Richard Branson and Russell Simmons. "When we started, business conferences were ripe for reinterpretation," says Leve, 28. "None of the big conferences focused on their young constituencies. One of our inspirations was what Cirque du Soleil did for the circus, which was a transformation around what circus could be and what it could mean." Thayer Walker agrees: "We love business; we don't love business conferences. Most conferences are boring. You sit in a dark auditorium and listen to a person talking. We're not so much about spreading ideas, but building relationships."

Only 19 entrepreneurs attended the first Summit Series gathering in April 2008 in Utah's Alta ski resort. Seven months later, Summit organised an event in Mexico for 65 people. "That was the 'aha' moment," says Leve. "At that point, we didn't have much exposure to people with successful businesses, but all of a sudden we were surrounded by people like Tim Ferriss and Tony Hsieh." A second key moment came in 2009: a few weeks after Barack Obama was inaugurated, the group received an invitation to the White House to meet senior officials. "We organised an event for 35 top entrepreneurs in DC," says Leve. "We acted as a connecting piece for the young entrepreneurial talent of our generation."

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A Summit Series gathering typically lasts for three days, with multiple activities happening at the same time -- such as plenary sessions on space travel, workshops on lucid dreaming or concerts by artists such as Q-Tip and The Roots. A team of ten people handles all the invitations, meeting and interviewing every person before deciding whether to invite them. " Tony Hsieh said, in order for us to make something bigger than a conference and more like a community, we should focus on people we would really want to spend time with and be friends with, irrespective of their successes," says Leve. "It's not about keeping people out but finding a way to get the right people in, people who are doing work that is greater than themselves."

According to Walker, they introduced Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook, to Spotify -- Parker subsequently invested $15 million (£9.5 million) in the Swedish startup. Through its own fund, Summit has also invested in

taxi startup Uber and eyeglasses company Warby Parker. Its first investment, Qwiki, sold last July for $50 million (£31 million). Powder Mountain is its latest investment, made possible from a funding round that included Summit's founding members such as self-help author Tim Ferriss, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel and former

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Elle magazine publisher Sunny Bates. "We have aspirations to be a global lifestyle brand," says Leve. "We want our guests to have the kind of relationship that exceeds the limitations of the event. There's a lot more value in a deeper relationship that's rooted in friendship than the standard trading of business cards that people consider to be networking."

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When the Summit Group moves to Powder Mountain it will leave behind an impressive set of locations from around the world. Here's what attendees have experienced away from the darkened auditorium.

Summit Basecamp

The mountains around Lake Tahoe played host to a four-day Summit in January 2012. Days featured yoga, skiing and "polar bear" plunges into icy pools. Among 650 guests were musician José

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González, entrepreneur Eric Ries and Mikheil Saakashvili, the president of Georgia.

Summit at Sea

In April 2011, Summit attendees including Richard Branson and Peter Diamandis took to the seas for a three-day cruise from Miami to the Bahamas. The discussion focus was on preserving the ocean: guests debated with scientists and conservationists, and tried shark-tagging.

DC10

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Bill Clinton, Ted Turner and John Legend were among the guests at a 2010 conference in Washington DC. As well as opportunities to innovate and collaborate, DC10 put on a range of evening activities, such as a charity auction for dates with some of Summit's singles.

RussellSimmons' house

In July 2009, Summit invited guests to an event at entertainment magnate Russell Simmons' Manhattan home to discuss ways of raising money for the Clinton Foundation. Bill Clinton was there to help generate ideas; the event raised $265,000 (£170,000).

This article was first published in the October 2013 issue of WIRED magazine